Ambrose Video (Firm)

Episode two examines the long spring following the Ice Ages. In this time, man develops agriculture and domesticates animals, imposing his will on wild wheat and horses. With the Neolithic cultivators come the mounted Nomads, the predators, and the roots of human warfare.

Humans are among the most social animals on the planet. We need a shared system of language, beliefs, norms and values to survive and mature from birth to adulthood. In this program, Alec Murphy investigates human culture and how geography helps everyone make sense of the cultural landscape.

The Sherlock Holmes of science, James Burke tracks through 12,000 years of history for the clues that lead us to eight great life changing inventions - the atom bomb, telecommunications, the computer, the production line, jet aircraft, plastics, rocketry, and television. Burke postulates that such changes occur in response to factors he calls "triggers," some of them seemingly unrelated. These have their own triggering effects, causing change in totally...

This production is part of a famous series produced by BBC of all of William Shakespeare's plays. The resulting films, renowned for their loyalty to the text, utilized the best theatrical and television directors and brought highly praised performances from leading contemporary actors.. With practical jokes, poetry and haunting songs, this is the most subtle of Shakespeare's comedies. In an aristocratic country house, we see the infatuation of Orsino,...

Here, Burke offers an examination of the cultural innovations produced between the middle ages and the Renaissance, paying particular attention to how commercialism, climate change, and the Black Death influenced these cultural changes.

The Zulu Independent Churches in South Africa. When Christian missionaries took the Gospel to Africa they also tried to suppress African religion and subvert African culture with their own. But since World War I, and with increasing vigor in the last 20 years, Africans have been rediscovering their lost religious identity and have been forming independent churches with their own festivals, prophets and rituals and greater or lesser devotion to Christ....

From ancient Oriental metallurgy, through mystical alchemy this episode traces the roots of chemistry. Shang bronze craftsmen and Samurai sword smiths are the starting point for a journey leading from medieval Europe to Dalton's atomic theory and our modern knowledge of the elements.

Diarmaid MacCulloch discusses the rise of the Greek Orthodox Church in Constantinople and the rise of the , Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow.

Diarmaid MacCulloch discusses the origins of Christianity in ancient Israel.

As the human population has grown to over 7 billion people, nothing has had to change more than the geography of agriculture. Program five studies the primary relationship between people and the cultivation of land and how agriculture has developed to sustain Earth’s ever-growing population.